Project Details
Projekt
Ashkenazi Jews in new urban life-worlds of Eastern Europe: the example of Greater Poland (1386–1434)
Applicant
Dr. Jörg Müller
Subject Area
Medieval History
Early Modern History
Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
Early Modern History
Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 517713369
The question of how the Ashkenazi diaspora in Poland emerged and took shape is one of the core problems addressed by the Research Group. Around the mid-16th century, the Polish kehillot appear as populous and well-organized in the sources, but the origins of their members and, more generally, the early history of these communities is largely unknown. The individual project takes this as ist point of departure, to address a well-known lacuna of research, by investigating the Jewish migration from the regions of the Empire to Poland. It focuses on Greater Poland (Wielkopolska) and uses extensive, rarely consulted sources. The aim of the project is to analyze this process for the period from the late-14th century in view of the Jewish agents taking part in it. It will take a critical stance towards earlier, unproven theories, according to which Jewish emigration to Poland mainly resulted from disruptive events in the Empire during the 14th and 15th centuries. The charters and chronicles of late medieval Poland analyzed so far have given no clear evidence to this end. The search is complicated by the fact that unlike in large parts of the Empire, Jews in Poland were rarely identified in the sources by epithets denoting their place of origin. The project therefore adopts a new strategy to address this problem. It focuses on a typical region and traces Jewish agents in the extensive, though rarely used holdings of court registers, over a period of almost a half-century (1386-1434), in order to reconstruct their many-fold personal relationships and their movements in and beyond the region. In this way, it will establish chronological convergences between the advent of Jews in Poznan or other towns in Greater Poland, and the disruptions in the Empire, such as the fateful 'cancellations' of Jewish debts by King Wenceslas in 1385 and 1390, the pogroms of 1389 in Prague and Lower Lusatia, and the expulsions from towns and territories starting in 1390. In this regard, this individual project can refer to sources collected at the Arye Maimon Institute in a previous project, the Corpus of Sources for Jewish History in the Late Medieval Empire. Moreover, the new data on Jewish agents will reveal their involvement in Jewish forms of self-organization and network relations. They thus open a new window on how the immigrants in these towns, which were new to them in so many ways - geographical, political, cultural and linguistic - and where they encountered long-resident fellow Jews, contributed to transforming them into new Jewish life-worlds. The project thus offers a significant contribution to the history of Jewish migration across the borders of the Empire in the late-14th and early-15th centuries, an otherwise poorly documented period of Eastern European history.
DFG Programme
Research Units
